Odd job

You are given some odd tasks as a journalist. One day the telephone rang and a contact asked me to find him a dwarf (sorry, a person of restricted growth) for the UK’s first ever dwarf-throwing contest. I’ll tell you about that another time.

But one of my strangest assignments was from a showbiz contact who wanted a new face for one of his singers. She was an accomplished club act but her career was in the doldrums and she wanted to become the UK’s top Madonna look-alike and sound-alike.

There was just one drawback. While she could passably sing like Madonna she looked more like Maradona. At the time the necessary cosmetic surgery cost around £16,000 and she could only afford half.

I set to work writing to about 20 plastic surgeons outlining the case. I was offering substantial coverage in a national newspaper in return for a hefty reduction in their fees. Nine replied and it so happened that one lived close to the lady’s home 300 miles away from mine.

I duly contacted a friend who was deputy editor of The Sun and received from him a letter saying how the story had the potential to be a double page spread in the world’s biggest selling daily newspaper. I drove down, picked up the warbler and eventually found the clinician’s lavish home.

The crunch of the gravel drive under our feet went on for some time as we passed the Rolls Royce and the huge mobile home. The surgeon asked me to wait in the “drawing room” while he interviewed my “client”. Some 20 minutes later the two of them emerged and he pronounced the singer physically and mentally fit to undergo the operation. It involved pulling the skin off her face like removing a Marigold from your hand and cutting here and there. Thankfully I hadn’t had breakfast.

“Wonderful,” I said and pulled the Sun letter from my inside pocket with a flourish. The surgeon read it carefully and handed it back to me. “Interesting, but there’s just one problem,” he said. “A few years ago the Sun newspaper called me Dr Frankenstein.” I gulped. “Really, you sued, of course?” He gave a shrug. “Well yes, but let’s put it this way, their lawyers were cleverer than mine!”

When I got home I checked the cuttings. The surgeon was quoted as saying: "I especially don't like doing operations in December. I don't like patients ringing me up moaning that they are bleeding while I'm carving the Christmas turkey."

I eventually arranged for another surgeon to perform the operation. We agreed to let the scars heal and then arrange a photo-shoot. But while I was away on holiday the singer gave an impromptu interview to a rival newspaper which sunk the whole project and left me out of pocket. Freelances live on results. I felt like rearranging her face myself. Mind, I’ve never seen or heard of her again. It just hurts whenever I hear Madonna sing "I'm So Stupid".....